A mobile device may be assigned an arbitrary device name during initial or subsequent set-up of the mobile device. In order to interact wirelessly with another nearby mobile device (e.g., via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, etc.), a pairing/registration process may be conducted, wherein the results of the pairing/registration process may be used to facilitate future wireless connections between the devices. For example, a Bluetooth pairing process might include a discovery phase in which a “discoverable” device temporarily broadcasts the arbitrarily assigned name along with additional device data for capture and analysis by the nearby mobile device.
The pairing process may also include an authentication phase in which the two devices share information such as a personal identification number (PIN, e.g., in Bluetooth paring) or service set identifier (SSID) code (e.g., in Wi-Fi registration) in order to verify the identity of the user(s) of the devices. Thus, successful completion of the authentication phase may enable the devices to “remember” one another so that future connections may be made without security concerns.
Such an approach, however, may negatively impact battery life during both the discovery and authentication phases due to increased power consumption associated with the wireless transmissions and computational overhead. Moreover, the authentication phase may be cumbersome, time consuming and lead to a negative user experience. While the user of the nearby mobile device may be permitted to select authorized devices based on their broadcasted device names as an alternative to PIN/SSID code based authentication, the user of the nearby mobile device may not recognize and/or trust the discoverable device based solely on the arbitrarily assigned name of the discoverable mobile device.